PRAYER TO MARY ON THE DANCEFLOOR
︎︎︎ Melinda Freudenberger
︎ AUG 3, 2021
mary mother of bottomless drinks and morning afters:
bestow upon me disobedience | make me un-sexy, un-
easy | pluck each tooth out of my mouth to kiss the wetness
left behind | in a dream i’m gifted a figurine of you, fully
enrobed in blue silk, hands extended in perpetual giving |
in this dream i wear a choker | in this dream i end up
wearing nothing, pressed against another body, smoothed
and slicked over glittering bathroom tile as our mutual
understanding invents a new way to undo me | un-
everything, i prayed and you took me, pushed not one but two
fingers in past my lips | i hold your gaze: there is a whole
new challenge at the bottom of me—it hangs limp and full
off of a single branch | they got it wrong, you said, at the
beginning of the world there was just one woman with
a finger on her clit, dreaming
Melinda Freudenberger received her MFA in Poetry from The New School. Her work has been recently published in the New Delta Review and Always Crashing magazine and is forthcoming in Anomaly.